An angel’s road to hell

105. Of threads, decisions and a little rewind

Cassandra Pendragon

One might ask why I had said eight legged monster, there hadn’t been much to see after all, images don’t usually linger on the edge of dreams but the longer I communicated with Shassa, the more real everything appeared to me. From exchanged memories lived through between two fluttering thoughts the scene around had developed into the grey of the mind scape, a place I was starting to get familiar with. I had a body and sensory impressions but there was nothing there except for a hazy silhouette, still hidden behind a veil of fuzzy thoughts.

With every contact, every exchange she had become clearer until I saw her for the first time and the disembodied memories flowed together to show me whom I was dealing with. Her body was that of a huge spider, bloated and black with red markings in the shape of a reversed cross on her back. Eight bowed, chitinous legs held her upright, each one of them at least 2 metres long with a sharp, deadly claw at its end. Her torso ended in spinnerets that constantly pumped a sticky, purple fluid along the last pair of her legs which was in constant motion, forming spell formations from the stuff and ripping them apart again before they could fully invoke. A constant clacking filled the air and the sweet stench of her silk, similar to rotten fruits, assaulted my nostrils. But it was quite easy to ignore, since her head held most of my attention. Flat and angular with eight eyes regularly placed along the middle stared at me with the hungry gaze of a hunting predator. Huge mandibles, the inside glistening with deadly poison slashed through the air and when they opened wide I could just about make out the maw behind them, a dark, wet gullet filled with circles of needle like teeth that reminded me of a viper’s fangs, the dark spots where poison channel broke through the surface clearly visible.

She appeared to be standing on a web of intricately intertwined lines that shimmered in different colours and led off into the distance. Every few seconds a pulse of power raced through the web and made the strands tremble and shiver, some of them even snapping right down the middle and I now realised that she was constantly forming patches and enchantments from her silk to support the failing construct, reinforcing strand by strand. Prefect, just perfect.

I couldn’t help it, for quite some time I simply stared at her, her alien features and psychedelic appearance too much to take in all at once.

“It’s quite rude to stare, you know?” Her voice was a far cry from anything I had expected. It wasn’t wheezy or hoarse, intimidating or even unpleasant, it was smooth, maybe a bit too deep to be called beautiful, but fascinating all the same, like a sheet of dark velvet that glided across my perception.

“I’m sorry, a spider on a rainbow wasn’t what I had been expecting. Forgive my curiosity.” Once again I thought that politeness might actually go a long way. Not that it ever had, but hey…

“We’re not really here, those are just manifestations of our mind, at least for me, that is. Would you prefer something along those lines?” She changed. The colourful web beneath her remained the same but the silhouette of the huge spider started to flow like water and before I knew it an alluring woman stood in her place. She was tall and slender with raven black hair and eyes, her only feature that didn’t appear human. Hunger stared at me from the depths of those eyes, the same predatory gleam that had filled her gaze before. A robe of black silk flowed around her shoulders and down her long legs, more memory than actual cloth it was plastered to her from like a second skin. When she smiled, her lush lips revealed the same needle like teeth I had spotted before and a cold shower ran down my spine. Before, she had appeared brutal and savage, but this form radiated danger like fire radiated heat, giving a face to the dark natures that slumbered within us all.

“I don’t care too much for your looks, Mylady, but for what I can do. Is everything you’ve shown me the truth?”

“That entirely depends on your perspective and what we can come up with, but for now I can show you what is left of your friends, if that’s what you want.”

“Not if you expect me to do anything besides crying for the next hours. If I understood you correctly, their fate is not yet set in stone. How do I get them back?’ She moved her finger in a complicated series of gestures and the lines at her feet rose up.

“What you’re seeing before you is a tapestry of fate, a neat trick I learned from my last jailor. It allows me to see decisions in the past that helped form the future. As you can see, it’s collapsing, the threads unraveling. While this may very well spell our doom, it also means that this place in time is in flux, until it collapses. I’ve tasted your blood, you can use this moment, you can cross over and change the past to alter the future, something my previous tormentor always strived to do. I can show you the way and I have a request as well, but if you’re willing, this won’t be the end. Not for you and not for them.” That sounded pretty much like a cranked up version of what I had done to form the connection between her and Reia and that hadn’t turned out too well. Just thinking about the pain I had had to go through back then made me shiver. I hadn’t planned on trying that ever again but like a well known philosopher once said: you can’t always get what you want, but if you try, you might get what you need. I needed a world with Ahri in it, there simply was no alternative.

“Pretty words, but what does it mean?” I asked. Even though I was pretty much willing to jump through burning hoops at the moment, I still intended to be somewhat smart about it.

“Here, watch,” she said and picked up one of the threads that led to a thick knot in the tapestry. On her silent command it unraveled and scenes from the past danced along the line in front of me. They changed too fast to glimpse much detail but now and again I thought I saw a familiar face or even a golden dragon in the whirlwind of colours.

“One of the strands that has led to this moment in time. It’s not overly useful on its own except to reconstruct the purpose of the past and gain some insights. But,” she whirled her hand about and instead of one web, a myriad of them appeared, one overlaid over the other until the individual strands blurred together, “here and now there isn’t just one of them. Every thing has happened somewhere, somewhen and the pulses from the mana seed have eroded the walls between the different streams to a degree that they bleed into one another. This means I can search for the outcome I desire and simply follow the threads to see which coincidences have led there. I’ve found several paths that seem interesting enough but we can only reach the minority of them. You see, every instance that stretches beyond the ripples the mana seed has caused is off limits, meddling with them would instigate the usual conundrums from paradoxes to the very same ripple effects we’re dealing with right now. A very bad idea in other words.” She paused for a moment to collect her thoughts.

“From what I’ve gathered, there are a handful of decisions and circumstances that can be tweaked. The number and identities of the people you take with you, for instance. I’ve already made sure that Reia was among them, otherwise we wouldn’t even have gotten this far.”

“Does this mean we’ve already been here before?” I couldn’t help but interrupt.

“No, but I’ve seen it before,” again she manipulated the threads around her until I saw myself in conversation with the spider, sometimes I appeared battered and bruised and once or twice I couldn’t even recognise myself at first glance, hidden as I was behind a full plate armour.

“We’ve met many times but it has always been too late. The dice have been cast and while you might survive even from this point onwards, nothing else will withstand the temporal explosion that’s to come. If you want to save your friends, you’ll have to prevent it from happening all together. Unfortunately we can’t simply reach back and prevent my downfall, the cataclysm, or another important event that has led here, they’re too far away and not impacted by the explosion of the seed. We’ll have to make do within the small frame from basically since you arrived on the island up to a few seconds in the future from now when everything turns into ash. Tell me, do you carry a set of small statuettes with you? Ancient ones, carved in the likeness of men with animal heads?”

“Have you seen them as well? What are they?”

“They’re mine! The greatest piece of magic I have ever wrought. They’re a prison and a lifeline and I think I can use them. It’s too late now, but if I had had them only an hour earlier I could have prevented the activation of the seed and maybe even shut down the fragment of the heart that started all of this. As for what they are, each of them contains a structured spell formation that mimics a soul and nourishes the parasites I’ve sealed in there ages ago. Parasites might be a bit misleading, even though they are just that, but I’m talking about the hungry consciousness of powerful entities born from pure magic, gods in their time.”

“Seth, Horus and the like? I’ve heard the story. So it’s true? Amon asked your help in ridding the land of a horror the people themselves had conjured?”

“Partly, a conscious mind doesn’t simply appear but it’s close enough. Where did you learn about it, anyways?”

“A part I’ve seen as the echo of Amon’s memories in one of his spells and Viyara, the golden dragoness told me the rest, at least as a myth from ages past. I didn’t know if it was actually the truth but now… I have them with me right now. Do you want them back?”

“Tempting as that might be, there wouldn’t be a point, like I said, it’s too late. The damage is too great, there’s nothing we can do from this point onwards. What I want you to do is use that transcendent energy of yours to cut through the web and go back in time. If you can bring me the statuettes, I think I can guide you in restoring my body and severing the seed from the fragments of the heart, powering it down for the foreseeable future. This whole episode will never have happened, you’ll be the only one to know the truth which unfortunately also means that I won’t have any recollections of who you are. I won’t help you willingly, the only reason why I’m not trying to suck the marrow from your bones right now is what I’ve already seen in alternate streams. If you’re successful the seed will never fully awaken in the first place and I won’t have that knowledge. You’ll have to convince or subjugate me. You’ve seen the state I’m in, don’t expect too much sympathy for your plight. I’ll probably ask you to free me beforehand and hand over the statuettes but believe me when I say, I’m going to leave you behind the moment you comply or I’ll even try to regain what I’ve lost by consuming you. Don’t trust me, Cassandra.”

“Great, simply great. And how do you suggest I’ll go about it? Never mind that I still have no clue how you expect me to travel back through time, even if I arrive, I’ll need your help and there isn’t much I can bargain with.”

“Are you an immortal or not? Make me fear your wrath more than another eternity in the dark. I’ve seen what you’ve done to me in some of the streams. You’ve got enough darkness in you to drown a world, Light Bringer.” Her words made me shiver and not only because she had called me by my name.

“How can you know me? Where did you hear that name?”

“Did you not listen? Right now I can see the infinite possibilities in time and some of them reveal more than you seem to think. I’ve seen what slumbers beneath your pretty face, you’re task is to make me see it again. Make me fear you enough that I think you’ve got it in you to give me what I truly desire. Revenge, revenge and a chance to walk this earth once again.”

“And what if I can’t? What happens if I can’t convince you?”

“Then we’re doomed, Amon will activate his shard and sooner or later learn of its secrets. Who knows, maybe another immortal will strike him down if he goes down that path but we won’t be there to see it. There are no guarantees.”

“No, there are none. I don’t even have one on your intentions, now, do I? It sounds an awful lot like I’m going to deliver power directly into your lap at a time when you can still use it. Why should I trust you now?”

“Because the alternative is nothing you want to live through. Do you want me to show you the scene when you realise you’ve left the love of your life and your family for dead, even though you could have prevented it? You won’t be able to recognise yourself, let alone what you’re going to do.” I was afraid she was right but that didn’t do much to ease my doubts. Admittedly, the whole you have to scare me into obedience shtick was nothing I’d have expected if she had planned to betray me, but then again… if I had seen a chance to wake up and find my friends still alive, I would have taken it but Shassa’s fragmented memories had been enough to convince me not to try that. If they weren’t dead, they were dying and even though I was willing to bet quite a lot on the functionality of my new wing, that was a risk I wasn’t willing to take. And then there was this whole time stream debacle, in case it was actually as bad as the spider had claimed, but my own experiences, from the strange intuitions to the cross over that had nearly killed me, pointed pretty much in the same direction. Call it a gut feeling, but I didn’t think she was lying, at least not about the important bits.

“Not having much of a choice is starting to get old,” I huffed. “So what exactly am I supposed to do? Make a wish and disappear?”

“If only it were that simple. The web is more than just a visualisation, its very parts are linked with the underlying reality. You have to step through, cut your way to the other side and hopefully your own past will attract you. If you’re going to get lost between the different streams, there won’t be a way back. I can only show you the destination, the rest is up to you.”

“And once I’m there I’m going to scare you straight and then what? Just hand over the statuettes and wait?” She sighed.

“The constructs, once opened, should be able to devour the seed without repercussions. The trick will be to seal them again but if I have my body back I’ll be able to help. I’ve done it before and I can do it again. I just can’t say what it’s going to cost.”

“There always is a price,” I answered quietly. “Is there something else I ought to know?” I added clearly.

“Make sure you always have the upper hand when you’re dealing with me and don’t fall for my traps. Be wary of what you do once the statuettes are broken. They’re powerful and dangerous,  maybe more so than Amon. Exchanging one scourge for the other would make everything worse. Good luck, Cassandra. You’ll need it.” On her command one of threads rose up, unraveled and formed a perfectly sharp scene. I saw the hall again, but this time it was empty, the towering statue and the shrivelled up corpse in its clutches the only source of movement.